People setting up meetings and events often need to negotiate a meeting location. There are usually many issues to consider when making such an arrangement including local amenities, specific settings, nearby freeways, traffic, and personal preferences. If they do not have detailed knowledge of potential meeting and event locations, they may need to spend time exchanging resources such as maps and travel routes and suggestions over email or instant messaging.
Existing communication methods are not always adequate. For example, instant messaging applications are generally limited to text exchanges and explanations. Mapping mashups (a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool) exist, but are limited to static data from a database. Services for meeting with new people serendipitously have been offered by companies like Meetro, Dodgeball, and Loopt, but these operate through alerts and text notification services to mobile phones only when another user is near. Furthermore, previous work has been done on internet relay chat (IRC)—for example, for discussion during preparation of electronic documents. This work does not describe the dynamic integration of content from multiple sources; neither do actions taken in the chat log affect the underlying documents into which the IRC chat channels are placed. Previous work also describes a series of visualizations for email. Again, the underlying content (email messages) is not dynamically drawn from multiple disparate sources, and the interactivity on the map itself is not dynamic. As another example, “chat bubbles”, are graphical bubbles around text associated with a visual object such as an avatar, but these are also not dynamically drawn from multiple sources. Furthermore, present applications do not locate instant-messenger conversations over any relevant dynamic, backdrop-content context.
The aforementioned services are of limited help for pre-arrangement of a meeting location. Currently, no application locates instant-messenger conversations within a relevant dynamic, backdrop-content context for arranging the details of rendezvous setting, group events and social meetings. Therefore, there is a need for systems and methods that provide help for arranging meetings dynamically.